Bless The Lord O My Soul

Bless The Lord O My Soul. In last month’s devotional, I shared the importance of prayer and described three ways to pray from 1 Timothy 2:1-4 – supplications, intercessions, and thanksgivings. This month we’re going to look at a form of prayer again, but this one is slightly different. There’s more human agency involved in it. Supplications, intercessions, and thanksgivings rightly place our focus on God and His ability to act in our lives for our good and His glory.

As we’ll see below, King David, the author of Psalm 103, draws upon his God-given agency and willfully makes some demands of his soul in light of the foundation of truth on which he’s building his faith. For better or worse, the concept of “truth” has come under a lot of scrutiny in our culture, but we all recognize how grounding a discovery of truth can be, even if I’m left wrestling with my feelings about it and its implications on my life. King David is wrestling in prayer as he pens this Psalm.     

103 Bless the Lord, O my soul,
    and all that is within me,
    bless his holy name!
2 Bless the Lord, O my soul,
    and forget not all his benefits,
3 who forgives all your iniquity,
    who heals all your diseases,
4 who redeems your life from the pit,
    who crowns you with steadfast love and mercy,
5 who satisfies you with good
    so that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s.  

David begins this Psalm by speaking to himself. In verses 1-5 he commands his soul to bless the Lord. “Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless his holy name!” Agency. Recognizing the truth that God is worthy of genuine worship from the heart, and perhaps that his soul was not fully meeting that right response to God, David is intentional to instruct his soul to bless the Lord and remember His benefits. He reminds himself of God’s forgiveness, healing, redemption, steadfast love, and mercy and that He satisfies His people with good things.

Certainly, David had seen evidence of these benefits of God throughout his life which reinforced the truth of them, and calling them to mind stirred up his soul to worship. This kind of self-talk David demonstrates is an important part of the Christian life. In fact, it is part of how we fight the good fight of faith. Without intentionally and regularly reminding ourselves of the truth of Who God is and what He has done, we tend to forget. When we are passive about our thinking, we drift. Drifting is never toward Christ. Drifting always carries us away. This is the idea we see in the book of Hebrews: 

“Therefore we must pay much closer attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away from it.” Hebrews 2:1 (ESV). 

Our natural thoughts aren’t always true and helpful thoughts. Without doing the work to keep our thought life in check, we tend to be heavily influenced by our circumstances and feelings. We tend to forget the truth that we know. We experience this all the time at work, and it can deeply affect our performance. We certainly don’t always feel like youthful eagles! There are several places in Scripture where Christians are reminded to be aware of our thoughts and to correct them according to God’s truth. Not only to stir up our souls to right worship as David demonstrates, but to make sure that our thoughts or our worldview – the framework through which we view everything – are grounded in the framework of God’s truth: 

“Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life.” Prov 4:23“ 

We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ,” 2 Cor10:5-6 

It is important to not just pay attention to the thoughts we have, but to examine and correct those thoughts until they are right thoughts and true thoughts – obedient to Christ. We can only do that by comparing our thoughts to what God tells us in His Word. His Word is the source of truth. Through it, God instructs us to know what is true and right and good and reminds us how to think and what to do. David recognizes his need to speak truth to himself and stirs up his soul to bless the Lord. May we be mindful of doing the same thing this month and beyond in our work, and life, and everything… 

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